The present invention relates to an industrial vehicle such as a fork lift truck and more particularly to a transmission for said vehicle.
Industrial vehicles perform frequent forward and backward movements due to the nature of their usage so that a clutch mechanism and particularly a synchronizer used in the transmission gear which enables the aforementioned forward and backward movements are subject to rapid wear. Wearing of the synchronizer is notable because when switching between forward and reverse directions the relative speed between the cone clutch portions of the synchronizer are very high due to the fact that the forward gear and the reverse gear rotate in mutually reverse directions.
In conventional transmissions used in industrial vehicles the forward gear, the synchronizer and the reverse gear are assembled together on the main shaft. Therefore when one of the just mentioned components needs to be replaced, at least one of the forward gear, synchronizer and reverse gear needs to be removed from the main shaft. This entails the removal of the main shaft from the transmission unit enabling the appropriate replacement to be made and the subsequent reassembly of the transmission. However due to the construction of the transmission and vehicle it is necessary in order to facilitate the gear or synchronizer replacement to remove the engine as well as the transmission. The engine and transmission as is well known are very heavy units and require considerable time and effort to remove and reinstall. Hence with prior art transmission excessive labour costs and downtime of the vehicle have occured each time a simple gear replacement has been necessary.